Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

Jawaharlal’s approach to the economy was in many ways characteristic of the great flaw that afflicted many freedom-fighters: the experience of exclusion and prison gave them an excessively theoretical notion of governance, while nationalist passions injected mistrust of foreigners into policy. Public sector ventures were run like government departments, overstaffed by bureaucrats with no commitment to their products and no understanding of business. Of course, some good came of Nehru’s bad economics: above all, the establishment of a norm of peaceful social change, eschewing both the radical violence and passive conservatism. The former was the preference of the Communists who felt the government should use its power to bring ‘a revolution from above’, while the latter was favoured by the landed zamindars and commercial interests who bankrolled the Congress party. But Jawaharlal was able to resist both tendencies in favour of promoting gradual change through land reforms and progressive legislation. Some would point also to the development of India’s industrial and intellectual infrastructure—the dams, steel mills and institutes of technology that are the most visible result of Jawaharlal’s leadership of India’s economic policy. Yet others could argue both that these could have come through the private sector and that most of India’s public sector industries were so inefficient that the country would actually have been better off without them.